The death scenes in the Friday the 13th film series are legendary, going back to the spectacular effects make-up crafted by Tom Savini for the 1980 original. And horror fans will be happy to know that Peacock’s new Crystal Lake series will carry on the tradition of drenching everyone and everything in plenty of stage blood.
Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, whose prior experience working on It: Welcome to Derry no doubt helped him calibrate the right level of gross-out, brought in Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning effects master Dave Presto to handle the red stuff.
“Whenever we do remakes, they change it slightly in the gore factor,” Presto said in a new Entertainment Weekly profile. “I was like, ‘So are we going to go full on, like level 10 gore? Are we gonna do 5, 6, 7?’ He’s like, ‘No, we wanna go 10.’”
He told EW his team used “probably 50 gallons of blood, if not more,” and called that “an obscene amount of blood. A gallon of blood is a lot.”
Star Linda Cardellini, who plays the infamous Pam Voorhees, was on the front lines of Crystal Lake‘s most visceral moments.
“I was happy those images were put on film, and then I was happy when those scenes were done,” she told EW. “I was ready for those scenes to be completed.”
We’ll get to see just how sticky Crystal Lake gets very soon: it arrives on Peacock October 15 in an eight-episode binge release.
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